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While it's sad that legitimate questions can label one, it's because "just asking questions" is a rhetoric now often used by trolls or conspiracy nuts. So most of these questions aren't really "reasonable", they are done in bad faith.

See: "JAQing off" or https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions

> […] is a rhetoric now often used by trolls or conspiracy nuts.

Can be used a DoS to eat up someone's time in responding to things:

> Sealioning (also spelled sea-lioning and sea lioning) is a type of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing people with persistent requests for evidence or repeated questions, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity.[1][2][3][4] It may take the form of "incessant, bad-faith invitations to engage in debate".[5]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning

So most of these questions aren't really "reasonable", they are done in bad faith.

Ask yourself this: Would a policy automatically labelling any question as conspiracy nut rhetoric, be acting in good faith? Such a policy could easily be exploited by a bad faith actor to silence actual substantive questions.

IMO, and from what I have seen, rationalwiki has a poor record, when it comes to intellectual integrity.

The saddest phase of the pandemic for me was watch the descent of the debate from initial phase in which people seemed genuinely interested in understanding what was going on to sad polarized tribal squabbling.

As an exercise, go and look up the mainstream news coverage of Hydroxychloroquine, then go and look up many dozens of research papers. Here's what you'll find:

    - Mainstream news on the topic is inaccurate, *highly sensationalized*, 
      and is often pointedly emotionally manipulative
    - The evidence is not one sided, and there is considerable signal in the 
      politically unpopular direction.
    - Mainstream news dotes on just a few studies which support their narrative
      and often don't talk about the problems with those studies, or even 
      when those studies are retracted

This is straight out of the western version of the "propaganda model" in Manufacturing Consent -- as a playbook.

It turns out that Hydroxychloroquine isn't that great. However, Ivermectin seems to hold a lot of promise, last I checked in on research. What's more, ask yourself this: Many people expected governments and organizations to react to the pandemic by combing through huge amounts of data, to see if existing drugs might have some effect. This is what a lot of medical professionals expected would happen. This isn't what happened. Instead, independent parties and agencies in 3rd world countries had to push things like that through, seemingly despite opposition. Go and look up the underwhelming numbers from studies for Remdesivir, and then ask yourself why that drug was so pushed for awhile, when others with far better study numbers were seemingly ignored or talked down. (Could it be the price?)

My conclusion, is that even the intellectualism of our society and its science has been corrupted. The liberal values of the philosophe have been replaced with "us versus them" jingoism, dressed up in flowery language. This flowery language turns out to be all surface. It has no historical and practical substantive support, but instead has its basis on emotional appeal.

There's a certain irony to this comment. It contains exactly zero science and it's currently at the top of the thread.

>contains exactly zero science

The way I read OP's comment was as a personal experience about what they've seen since joining HN 15 years ago. Are you suggesting that only "science based" comments should be top comments, and not personal experiences?

An appeal to listen to the data rather than the politics may not be science, but it is certainly the scientific mindset. It's not amiss to remind ourselves to turn our science brain on before starting this conversation.

What makes this (and science generally) difficult is at least the following:

1. The general public are not scientists, yet they distrust institutions so now they want to interpret data themselves but have no training.

2. Data can be sliced and diced to tell all kinds of stories.

3. Few can look at data and know what it doesn’t answer, or what questions should be asked but aren’t being.

4. Correlation is not causation, but that escapes almost all of us.

5. The people who generally know the field the best are poor communicators generally or at least to the general public. The people who can (or do) communicate with the public are subject to a game of telephone and don’t understand the science, and don’t know how to properly communicate uncertainty or the boundaries of knowledge.

6. Ordinary people will get ordinary answers, but due to cognitive biases will few exceptional in their ability to go against the grain.

However, the markers of government and media manipulation are largely commonsense.

    - Is there good evidence for the other side?
    - If so, how does the mainstream press react to that?
    - Are people trying to get others to not even look?

Lots of people will mistake conspiracy nut trash for good evidence. However, this is always the case, even for initial claims, not just counterclaims. That certainly does not mean that people shouldn't look and ask questions. If someone knows they're on the side of the truth, wherever the evidence might lead, then there's no reason to try and scare people away. If someone knows they have truth on their side, they can afford to let people ask questions. If someone is sincerely on the side of truth, they don't have to use tactics, like tarring and name-calling to discredit people who are wrong. The facts themselves will do that.

How the authorities react to questions, and to what degree they will try to avoid them, are themselves valuable indicators!

It's very true that the average science consumer is a lot like the average driver. There are lots of very bad ones out there. But it's only in an open society, where questions are encouraged, and where asking questions is acknowledged as speaking truth to power, where the truth will come out.

Remember when the semantic equivalent of "shut up and go along" was the very opposite of virtuous intellectualism? (And not mislabeled as intellectualism!)

Remember when we were proud of our freedom, of our societies where open inquiry was allowed and not suppressed?

The dream of the philosophe remains alive, and shall not die.

Can you please stop this? In this thread, you're creating the very problem you're complaining about. You've posted a lot of assertions across several comments in this thread. You've raised government and media boogeymen and criticized everyone's emotional response and lack of focus on science, all without a single citation of your own. You're not even discussing the article at hand, just posting a lot of both-sides rhetoric and platitudes that will be popular because everyone that reads it will think you're talking about other people.

You've posted a lot of assertions across several comments in this thread. You've raised government and media boogeymen and criticized everyone's emotional response and lack of focus on science, all without a single citation of your own.

Sure. Now go and look up a dozen scientific journal articles on Hydroxychloroquine, then see if I'm pushing a false narrative about government and media pushing narratives, or if that's a pretty reasonable one. I'm fine with letting the numbers speak for themselves.

You're not even discussing the article at hand, just posting a lot of both-sides rhetoric and platitudes that will be popular because everyone that reads it will think you're talking about other people.

This both-sides stuff is actually true. Also, if everyone realizes I could just as well be talking about the other side, then they take that thinking a step further, then the philosophes win. Those who are so biased, that they can't see this, are probably unreachable anyways.

If just one person changes their mind because of actually looking at something they didn't see, or saw in a different way, we all win. I think that's very relevant.

In the long arc of history with regards to the truth, "sides" are irrelevant.

(Seriously, how is getting HN readers to ask some questions and do their own research a bad thing? That's kind of head scratchy.)

7. Social media (including HN) rewards lower-effort first posts over greater-effort informational ones.

It takes significantly more time to sort though an article like this one, figure out what it's talking about and why it's just been published, pick up corroborating and/or refuting sources and articles, and turn it all into a digestible comment. Someone else can post a hot take in 5 minutes that develops into a Sierpinski Comment Tree by the time something more measured shows up.

Ironically, elsewhere I'm also advocating that people go through dozens of studies and actually look at the numbers, then evaluate mainstream media coverage against that actual data.

And my point is few have the skills to be able to do well (and far, far fewer ever would).

> The general public are not scientists, yet they distrust institutions

Of course. They'll lose trust the soonest when they see political statements coming out of the WHO, etc. And they should. An organization that can't stay neutral can't do good work in a politicized climate.

> Few can look at data and know what it doesn’t answer, or what questions should be asked but aren’t being

No, this is actually one of the easiest things to teach. "If you were paid to sneak in and ruin this team's research, what simple bias could you add? If it was the other way around, how would you protect against this?"

Teaching people to recognize a poorly controlled study is not difficult. But it's not PC these days because people are supposed to shut up when told that all scientists agree! We did this to ourselves a decade ago by tolerating the climate change debacle attacking dissent, now everything is fought through fake consensus.

> Correlation is not causation, but that escapes almost all of us

When it's not it almost always means there's an unseen factor though, so that wonderfully dismissive statement is usually just a red herring.

> The people who can (or do) communicate with the public are ...

Lying. They're lying. They're saying things they can't know as if they're fact. The WHO isn't saying that a lab leak seems less likely than other things, they're saying it didn't happen. Unless they can point to what did happen then logically they're not able to make that claim.

People might be scientifically illiterate, but luckily spotting lies is much easier and gets you mostly halfway there, able to spot when you're being manipulated even if you can't tell what the truth is. The real problem the media is having is that people aren't quite as dumb as expected.

> The people who can (or do) communicate with the public are ...

Lying. They're lying. They're saying things they can't know as if they're fact. The WHO isn't saying that a lab leak seems less likely than other things, they're saying it didn't happen. Unless they can point to what did happen then logically they're not able to make that claim.

It's very funny that Dr. Fauci came out and said the virus wasn't produced in a lab because we don't have the computational resources to model it. Full stop. That eliminates one way it could have been produced in a lab, but not all of them. Gain of Function research is often conducted by inducing mutations, then seeing how that changed the virus' capabilities. In fact, Dr. Fauci himself signed off on gain of function research in the very lab in Wuhan!

Dr. Fauci basically admitted in public that he as good as lied to the public, saying that masks were not useful, because he wanted to keep them for health workers. I think the press should be asking a lot more questions around here.

The real problem the media is having is that people aren't quite as dumb as expected.

It's almost as if the media believed the bigoted nonsense they say about some segments of the populace, and were disconnected from reality. Of course, that wouldn't be the case. Otherwise, we'd start to see things like public opinion polls that are systematically inaccurate, political consultants making huge miscalculations, or media companies doing things completely contrary to what fans of their products want and what profitability would demand. We'd see media companies suppressing things like downvotes, or having difficulty getting traction with their channels on YouTube.

If that were the case, then you wouldn't see evidence of groupthink and enforced groupthink in leaked journalist mailing lists and forums. If that were the case, there would be leaks of higher-ups dictating news narratives on conference calls -- which would then be systematically suppressed by journalists across the board.

We don't see any of that now, do we?

Science has been politicized for a long time, and fear is nothing new. What 2020 brought (really before) is that people became ok expressing their fears.

> This is not how it's supposed to work, if we are supposed to be reasoning, thinking beings. Ideas are supposed to be ideas not tokens of affiliation!

We are humans not Vulcans. There is a spectrum of ability in various skills and abilities, including reasoning.

Reminder: there are people who honestly believe the world is flat.

We can't be free, unless we're all free to be wrong. The only logical alternative to that, is where "right" is dictated to us all.